“The culture goes dead without nature in it.”–taylor stoehr

A lot of the conversation that happens around surveillance is still really individualized in terms of this question: “If you have nothing to hide, what do you have to worry about?” You know, how much control does the state exert over an individual? But there’s much more to how the surveillance society plays out over the long term than that. For example, if you build a surveillance society, you create a giant power imbalance between the people and the state. That’s kind of an abstract thing to point out, but the whole point of a democratic society is that people have more power than the state. When you create mechanisms where that is not true, then you are creating a situation in which a democratic society is increasingly difficult to approach and maintain.